How a 24-year-old Lebanese entrepreneur found global success by beating Tamagotchi at their own game

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When Yahoo! paid 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio $30 million for news
summary app Summly, one of our Wamda contributors wrote us, “I’m
looking forward to the day when somebody on Wamda writes the Arab
version of this story.”

The story of Lebanese developer Paul Salameh is almost that story.
He might not be a teenager (he’s 24) and his app might not
influence the future of media consumption, but rumors have swirled
that he has been offered a similar amount for its acquisition.

“He’s been very successful, even by conservative estimation,” a
local source told us, based upon estimates of downloads of the
$1.99 iOS
version and in-app purchases on its free Android app.

For what? Pou. Yes,
that’s the name of his app, which resembles a colorful, mobile
version of Japanese digital pet Tamagotchi. In Pou, players can
feed, wash, and play games with a brown, triangular alien pet,
which has turned out to be wildly addictive; the app made a global
Top
5 Paid iOS Apps list last month, sees between between
260-320,000 free downloads a day on Android, and has so far
hit #1 in the iPhone kids games category in a total of 90
countries.

“People really relate to Pou, and they think it's cute,” says
Salameh, who is based in Beirut. “I've even seen people tattoo Pou
on their hand.”

As you play, you accumulate and can purchase coins to keep Pou
happy; the more users are endeared to Pou, the more in-app
purchases they are likely to make. Salameh won’t comment on the
revenues, but, he says, “people can estimate if they want to
estimate.”

“Tamagotchi 2.0”

With cute hand-drawn screens, a variety of custom games, and a
lot of attention to detail, Pou is charming in a way that
Tamagotchi simply isn’t. Bandai (now Namco Bandai), the company
that originally built the very first hand-held Tamagotchi, is now
feeling the sting of Pou’s success.

For those of you that are too young to remember, Tamagotchi was an
addictive digital “pet,” that you fed, played games with, and
disciplined, to help grow it from an egg to an adult. It only had
three buttons and a little LED screen on an egg-shaped device, but
it kept kids enthralled before we had iPads.

Now that it’s 2013, Namco Bandai seems stuck in 1996. They were
surprisingly slow to develop a mobile version, and the one they
launched recreates the L.E.D. experience of the 90s, not deviating
from Tamagotchi’s original interface and features, with a terrible
MIDI soundtrack.

When Pou launched on Android last August and iPhone this November,
it essentially cornered the market. By the time Bandai launched its
Tamagotchi L.i.f.e app this February, Pou had already surged to #1
in kids’ games in the App Store in 65 countries.

Now, Pou has not only brought that 65 to 90, it’s reached #1
overall in the iOS app store in 11 countries: Spain, Germany,
Denmark, Austria, The Netherlands, Slovenia, Chile, Hungary,
Macedonia, Iceland, and Estonia. In the U.S. App Store, it climbed
to #1 for kids’ games on March 4th, and at time of print was still
top in its category. Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. hasn’t ranked in any of
those countries, according to AppFigures.

With Pou’s engaging gameplay and dose of comedy (“How will YOU
customize your POU?”, its app pages implore), Salameh is not
worried about infringing on Bandai’s copyright.

“Pou has been called Tamagotchi 2.0 by its fans, but I don't call
it that. For me, it’s not really Tamagotchi. It's a different
concept and they have all kinds of different creatures.” Thus far,
he says, Bandai hasn’t contacted him with any concerns.

Perfecting Pou

Salameh’s success isn’t just a factor of being in the right place,
with the right idea, at the right time, however. It’s also the
result of Salameh’s obsessive focus on detail.

What you might not realize when you play Pou is that the
always-hungry character with the funny exclamation is based on
Salameh himself, emerging from a playful joke.

“It’s true,” he says. “My name is Paul, but my friends call me
Pou.” Even Pou’s sounds are his own recordings.

When a friend first suggested three years ago that he build Pou as
a pet app, Salameh had a full-time job and no business plan. It
wasn’t until he attended a game development conference at Lebanese
incubator Berytech that he realized the opportunity. “A guy was
talking about a European company that builds games for kids, and I
started thinking about the clothes and customizations for Pou, and
how you could buy or collect coins through mini-games.”

He left the talk 20 minutes after it started, and began building
once his job contract ended in May last year. Since then, he’s
continued to eat, sleep, and breathe, well, Pou.

On a typical day, Salameh wakes up, brushes his teeth, and then
turns on his laptop to thousands of unread emails. “Right now, I
have around 50,000 unread emails,” he says. “I read the most
important ones, along with suggestions, and get to work on what I
need to do.”

He works until lunch, maybe watches a TV show, works until 7 or
8pm, goes out for the evening, comes back, and works until “around
2am,” and then sleeps again. His sister, who is an architecture
student, helps him with the art ideas- “like those for new hats,”
and the friend that originally pushed him to build the idea “helps
with sound recording, customer support, and advertising.”

Coming soon to a toy store near you

His story is almost reminiscent of the Sticky Weasel HSBC ad
(below); Salameh is now completely dedicated to improving his
global brand. “I'm just going to keep working on Pou or products
related to Pou for at least two years,” he says.

He’s now developing a merchandise line, signing contracts in the
U.S., Europe, and Latin America. “Disney didn’t stop working on
Mickey Mouse when it became successful. Why would I work on
anything else?”

So does this mean we can expect to see plush Pou’s in Lebanon
soon?

Yes, says Salameh. “I'm still waiting for some samples that I need
to approve, and then they will start production.”

Candy, clothes, toys, stationery, and collectible cards will launch
in the U.S. and Europe. Deals with telecom companies in Europe will
also see Pou pre-installed in some devices.

Replicating global success

What fellow developers might want to remember when watching the
story of Pou is that Salameh learned everything he needed to know
about coding by himself, online. “I just Google basic examples and
build my code around them,” he
says.

If you want to replicate his success, here are his three tips:

“Always listen to your users.” In the first few weeks, he read
every single email he received about the app.

“Go out less.” Forget your social life and focus, he says. You’ll
have to spend at least 6 months being a complete workaholic to
launch something worthwhile.

Finally, “if you're not motivated and passionate, just stop. You
have to be crazy motivated… I've always been this way.”

Nina is director of Launchpad UAE, a platform that fosters the development and execution of social impact enterprises and corporate social responsibility initiatives, for sustainable environmental, economic and human capital development. Previously she was editor-in-chief at Wamda and more recently managing director of Flat6Labs Abu Dhabi.